Abstract
In his introduction to Reflections on Exile (2000), Edward Said remarks that ‘exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience’, because it is ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’ (cf. p. 233). There is an immediate and concrete urgency to the theme of exile: an exponential surge in conflict-driven migration has taken place over the last several years, giving rise to the refugee crisis. The editors of this collection of papers, Robert C. Hauhart and Jeff Birkenstein, begin their preface by acknowledging the global political context of their theme of European writers in exile, a follow-up to a previous edited volume, American Writers in Exile (2015). The topic is so vast that no collection of papers on it could claim to be comprehensive, but across these 16 contributions a wide range of figures and topics is addressed.
Charlotte Fiehn examines the lives of such nineteenth-century English authors as George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, who drew on their sense of social isolation – a kind of exile in their own place and time – to produce their literary works. Émile Zola’s exile in England, which lasted from July 1898 to June 1899, was a result of his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair and coincided with a shift from his role as an engaged public intellectual to a more private, reclusive figure, as Katherine Ashley argues. The title of Kelly C. MacPhail’s contribution alludes to the passage in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) where Marlow remarks, ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’, and Conrad’s novella, while not intended as a protest novel against the colonial horrors of European imperialism, was described by E. D. Morel as ‘the most powerful thing written on the subject’ (pp. 43 and 38).
Katarzyna Bałżewska considers Thomas Mann’s late, great novella Die Betrogene (translated as The Black Swan (1954)) as a literary account of his experiences in Californian exile, recognizing this text’s ‘symbolic paradoxes, complex metaphors, and unstable senses’ that reveal ‘biblical, mythological, historical, philosophical, or even socio-political dimensions’ (p. 57). Although James Joyce’s exile in Paris, Trieste and Zurich was self-imposed, Jeff Birkenstein considers how Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), was influenced by this sense of his own exile. A rather different sense of exile informs Robert Hauhart’s discussion of Franz Kafka as neither an expatriate nor a political or religious refugee, but as a writer whose life can best be understood as ‘an exiled mind so complete that it produced the negative, self-fulfilling prophecy that generated the outsider literature of The Metamorphosis’ and his three novels (p. xvi). Rowena Clarke considers how Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin (1957) reflects its author’s own liminal experience of the postwar émigré academic, using the space of the academic campus as a symbol of the émigré’s liminality.
Nabokov features alongside Viktor Shklovsky in Rossita Terzieva-Artemis’s contribution on Berlin as a centre of Russian émigré literature, while Shmuel Ledermann shifts the discussion away from literature towards philosophy in his analysis of the exilic experiences of two of the twentieth century’s most significant (and most intellectually divergent) political theorists, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. How do their respective systems of political thought reflect their responses to the rise of National Socialism, the Holocaust and the experience of exile (p. 135)? In her discussion of the Hungarian-born writer–journalist Arthur Koestler, Andrea Gay Tyndall draws on his published works from 1950 to 1953 as well as primary sources from the Arthur Koestler Archive in Edinburgh to argue that Koestler’s sense of exile predated his move to England during World War II and actually began in his childhood. While Koestler moved to London, during World War II such British authors and artists as Aldous Huxley, W. H. Auden, and Benjamin Britten emigrated to the United States; in this context, Irina Golovacheva considers the case of Christopher Isherwood, reading his memoir, Lost Years (2000), and its account of his homecoming from exile as offering insight into his true exile experience and revealing ‘the divided consciousness of the displaced Anglo-American’ (p. xix).
Readings of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and Ignorance (2002) form the basis of Liani Lochner’s discussion of this Czech writer’s experience of exile, while Brînduşa Nicolaescu examines how the work of the Romanian writer Norman Manea has enabled him to transmute his experiences of his American exile into powerful literary works. The memoir, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), of the Polish American novelist and essayist Eva Hoffman forms the starting-point of Johannes F. Evelein’s discussion of her work as a ‘theoretician and practitioner of Otherness’ (p. 221); Marion Christina Rohrleitner discusses existential exile and the narrative aesthetics of W. G. Sebald and the uses of photography in exilic writing (pp. 240 and 242); and Svetlana Stefanova examines ‘what it feels like to be both of and not of’ in relation to the work of Kittitian–British novelist, playwright and essayist Caryl Phillips (p. 251).
In fact, that subtitle of Stefanova’s contribution might be said to summarize the experience of all the figures discussed in these pages, from which a wide variety of responses to exile clearly emerges. For some, exile acquires an almost Gnostic intensity (as in Zola’s remark, ‘Here I am in a foreign world, as if I were separated from mankind’ (p. 21), whereas, for others, it unleashes enormous creativity. In her chapter, for instance, Ashley touches on the case of Victor Hugo who, after Napoleon III had seized power, moved to Brussels, then Jersey, and finally Guernsey, where he ‘settled into a life of relative contentment and productivity abroad’ (p. 20) and produced some of his most famous work, including his novel Les Misérables and three major collections of poetry. Whether understood as geographical displacement or ‘a deeply felt inner condition’ (cf. p. 1), exile can paradoxically enable the individual to establish a richer sense of the self.